CD Review: Guided by Voices

Let's Go Eat the Factory (GBV Inc.)

Looking at Robert Pollard, you wouldn't peg the Guided by Voices frontman as a nostalgic guy. But Let's Go Eat the Factory, the Dayton band's 16th album and first in eight years, is filled with fond looks back at the group's glory days, and it's made by the same lineup that created the classic album Bee Thousand. More than half of the album's 21 songs clock in at less than two minutes, and they mostly sound like the super-low-fi, recorded-on-cassette sketches and fragments that gained GBV such a fervent following among DIY enthusiasts. The band fumbles for some footing on the opening "Laundry and Lasers," but by the time they get around to the sweetly acoustic "Doughnut for a Snowman," the British Invasion homage "God Loves Us," and the garage-poppy "Unsinkable Fats Domino," it's like 1994 all over again. — Michael Gallucci